Even if you accept the idea that a ground invasion would’ve caused more suffering than NUKING TWO FUCKING CITIES, we’d be talking largely about military casualties.
We killed plenty of civilians at Dresden and in Tokyo, long before we dropped a nuke.
And quite a few of the WW2 ground troops were drafted. Kids as young as 16, handed a gun and shoved up on to a beach as cannon fodder. Younger than that, on the Japanese side, fighting a rear guard against a collapsing eastern front.
The whole affair was insane. Japan's military was defeated at Midway. Their industrial capacity on the mainland had been smashed six months earlier, through continuous aerial bombardment. Their imperial ambitions had been extinguished and they were already suing for conditional surrender. But Americans didn't want surrender, they wanted conquest. What Truman's government believed was that they would literally need to genocide the population of the country in order to secure it.
The nukes expedited the transformation of Japan into a vassal state.
We killed plenty of civilians at Dresden and in Tokyo, long before we dropped a nuke.
And quite a few of the WW2 ground troops were drafted. Kids as young as 16, handed a gun and shoved up on to a beach as cannon fodder. Younger than that, on the Japanese side, fighting a rear guard against a collapsing eastern front.
The whole affair was insane. Japan's military was defeated at Midway. Their industrial capacity on the mainland had been smashed six months earlier, through continuous aerial bombardment. Their imperial ambitions had been extinguished and they were already suing for conditional surrender. But Americans didn't want surrender, they wanted conquest. What Truman's government believed was that they would literally need to genocide the population of the country in order to secure it.
The nukes expedited the transformation of Japan into a vassal state.